- Authorities in Dubai are set to utilise drones to more effectively monitor, manage, and investigate fire incidents
- In a significant step towards modernising emergency response capabilities
- The agreement outlines plans to connect the Civil Defence reporting system with the Dubai Police Drone Systems Centre
While American policymakers engage in discussions on how to safely develop artificial intelligence (AI) technologies amidst global competition, leading tech companies are accelerating efforts to establish AI capabilities in data centres across the globe securely.
Microsoft has secured approval from the United States government to ship the latest Nvidia AI chips to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), highlighting its strategic role as a key gateway to the Middle East. The tech giant has already shipped the equivalent of 21,500 Nvidia A100 graphics processing units (GPUs) and has recently obtained a licence to export an additional 60,400 units.
The issue of security is essential. According to Janet Egan, a senior fellow and deputy director in the technology and national security programme at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS): “The US is looking to bring [the UAE] closer into the fold of the US orbit and geo-strategic partnerships, but at the same time, has to be very careful about not equipping another nation that might then shift or pivot its interests away from US interests.”
While Microsoft is making substantial investments in the region’s technology landscape, it isn’t the only one.
In a recent blog post dated November 3, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, revealed that the tech giant is set to invest over USD 7.3 billion in the UAE between 2023 and the end of 2025.
Smith also announced a further commitment of USD$15.2 billion by the end of 2029.
This comes after a collaborative initiative launched in May, involving five major companies: Cisco, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Group.
These firms have joined forces with G42 to establish Stargate UAE, a 1 gigawatt compute cluster that will serve as part of a planned 5 gigawatt AI campus connecting the US and UAE.
This project will allow the operation of an AI compute centre capable of hosting one million GPUs. The first phase of the Stargate UAE project is expected to commence operations next year, featuring a 200 megawatt facility.
“While the chips are powerful and the numbers are large, more important is their positive impact across the UAE,” Smith said. “We’re using these GPUs to provide access to advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source providers, and Microsoft itself.”
However, Sella Nevo, founding director and principal research at the Center on AI, Security, and Technology (CAST) at RAND Corp, says this could post a securty threat to the US.
“It is a lot easier to perform malicious operations in, let’s say, the Middle East than it is in the US,” he said as per Dark Reading. “You might worry that an adversary could sabotage a critical system or install backdoors … and there are many drivers of why that’s easier.”
The primary worry, though, is whether China can leverage agreements between the UAE and Microsoft to obtain sensitive chip technologies or AI computing capabilities.
So, security issues remain a worry. However, during previous work together, Smith claimed the company conducted ‘substantial work … to meet the strong cybersecurity, national security, and other technology conditions required by [the chip-export] licenses’.
The security measures for this deal have yet to be confirmed, but it may contain more robust measures than prior projects called for.
